Tales From Progress City

A closer look at a fascinating neighborhood from my fake US Midwestern city, which in the 1910s combined the sleek lines of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie Style with the surreal curves of European Art Nouveau and Tiffany stained glass to create a series of visually stunning mansions, hotels, restaurants, middle-class homes and more

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(Right-click on any image and choose “open image in new tab” to see the full-sized version.)

One of the things I love about this experimental storytelling project of Progress I’ve taken on is the opportunity to mash up two or more real things from history that could’ve mashed together in real life if things had aligned in a different way, but never really did. For example, in the Trout Alley neighborhood I detailed here the other week, I mashed together a history of hackers, indie rockers, LARPers, cyberpunks and slam poets all coming together in a neighborhood of abandoned warehouses in the late 1980s, eventually leading to the neighborhood’s gentrification and eventual takeover by the tech startup community.

But another mash-up from a real point of history I wanted to explore in Progress is why there wasn’t more overlap between what people like Frank Lloyd Wright was doing in early Prairie Style masterpieces, and the more delicate and surreal curves happening in European Art Nouveau in the same years, when you think of things like Gaudi’s buildings in Barcelona or the Metro stations in Paris. The closest these two worlds seemed to collide in the US in these early years of the 1900s was in the work of people like Louis Comfort Tiffany, so I figured you could throw that influence into the whole mix as well. So, why not for example imagine a male American architect firmly in the Prairie Style (Harry Miller), who through convoluted events ends up in a passionate extramarital affair with a French Art Nouveau architect (Madeline Durand, both of whom you’re seeing above), and whose torrid time together produced an explosive birth of a baby that contained half of each of them.

The duo began designing buildings in the newly expanding Turtle Bay neighborhood where they and the other fashionable creative classers of the early 20th century hung out; and the instantly memorable mix of long clean lines with complex, fractal curves in pleasing material like brick and concrete was to be quickly admired and emulated, until it became the predominant style of the entire area. The mix went well with everything from public housing to millionaires’ mansions, middle-class housing to upper-class restaurants, and it soon became codified and then exported to the rest of the world as the “Turtle Bay Style.”

I have to confess, I’m getting a great deal of pleasure out of getting high on a Saturday night, going over to the Google AI image generator, and cranking out very highly controlled and iterated images that imagine this Turtle Bay style, showcasing projects both big and small, public and private, in all kinds of materials and patterns you actually see in real buildings here in Chicago where I’ve lived the last 30 years. I admit, I love picturing the idea of Chicago actually having a neighborhood like Turtle Bay, where European Art Nouveau caught on in a way it just never did in any actual American city in these real-life years, much to America’s detriment.

I don’t know what the final form is going to be of the Progress storytelling project once it’s “finished” (or finished enough to present publicly), but most likely at the moment it looks like it will be a Wordpress account running a specialized theme that lets me turn the database of the usual blog into a front-end look and feel of a wiki. Right now I’m picturing the real Wikipedia as the model for this, and at the real Wikipedia, there’s a chance on any given page to create a big gallery of images at the bottom; so I imagine that’s what I’ll do with all these images, just run them as big galleries at the bottom of the eventual wiki page for Turtle Bay (crossed with the pages for Miller and Durand, the community of noir authors who lived in the neighborhood at the time, and all the other cross-posting that inspired me to publish this as a wiki in the first place).

I’ll be getting back to filling out large new sections of that wiki for the first time early in 2025; but for now, I’m having fun just posting neighborhood focuses here at the blog and having an excuse to go generate a bunch of images for them while high over at the Google AI image generator. It’s really letting me picture this construct as a real city for the first time, a complex and multifaceted place that perhaps really did exist in our universe at some point, only that all of us as a society decided to collectively forget about the city’s (and indeed, the entire state’s) existence. In the coming weeks, I plan on getting into more detail about (illustrated above, top to bottom): Oldtown, where placed like the old 1871 City Hall is located; the Central Business District next door, home of not only most of the city’s skyscrapers but also cultural institutions like the Progress Museum of Modern Art (or ProMoMa); the 1966 World’s Fair; the far-future (2040s) Sol planned eco-community; or 2020’s North Shore Entertainment District, a futuristic wonderland of high-end hotels, casinos and clubs, all of it owned by just a handful of mega-corporations, including the “Forbidden Island” you’re seeing in the foreground of the image, a One-Percenter-exclusive destination where drugs and prostitution are legal. I’m happy to spend the rest of the holidays just filling out those neighborhoods and more, then get to work again on the main wiki holding the entire project together once 2025 gets up and going. If you haven’t already seen it, make sure to check out this blog’s introduction for the links to subscribing to this through email, RSS, or ActivityPub (such as Mastodon or Threads). I hope we’ll have a chance to visit this city together over the coming weeks.

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